


3 Times Steve Sissay Got Rejected (And the One Time He Sort of Didn't)

by runnerzero



Category: Zombies Run!
Genre: F/M, No Sexual Content, Other, Season/Series 04 Spoilers, Season/Series 05 Spoilers, Season/Series 06 Spoilers, Steve Sissay is the townships slut, only Steve thirst, you heard it from me first
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-18 08:54:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21941470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runnerzero/pseuds/runnerzero
Summary: A glimpse into Steve Sissay's failed dating life
Relationships: Steve Sissay/Kefilwe Lobatse, Steve Sissay/Runner Five, Steve Sissay/Sam Yao, Steve Sissay/Sara Smith
Comments: 5
Kudos: 24





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Did I just want to write a fic about Steve getting dunked on by everyone in the township? Perhaps. 
> 
> Secret Santa 2019 gift for crazyspookies! 
> 
> (S4 spoilers)

Sara Smith has never been a good person. She doesn’t think she’s a bad person either. Not good. Not bad. Maybe somewhere in between.

But Steve Sissay? She doesn’t know where he falls. Whichever side is winning, most likely. That kind of wavering moral code is something she can’t admire, even if he is a decent shot.

Sissay is a simple man. At the very least, he’s easy to read. He wants to follow orders and he wants to be in control. 

But he isn’t soft. Sara doesn’t know if he has the capacity to be soft. He’s always been sharp edges and gunpowder. He blows things up, sometimes for fun. He can’t afford to be soft. It’s not very often that he falls apart—frays around the edges—but he does. 

He doesn’t unravel easily, but when he does, Sara enjoys every second of it. 

The second time she teams up with him for a mission, things go terribly wrong. Nothing she had to do with it, of course. She wasn’t stupid enough to bring explosives into an underground laboratory. But, well, they’re both still alive—if dirt-streaked and a bit bloody. 

Sissay looks a lot worse than she does. Pale faced and sweating, something shiny and desperate in his eyes. 

“You look terrible,” she tells him as they walk back to the collection point, wiping the drizzling rain out of her eyes.

“It’s this weather,” he says, clearly fighting to keep that smooth, even control in his voice. “Wreaks havoc on my complexion.” He looks at her as if he’s expecting a response, but she keeps her face flat, settled into the steel-cold calm she’s always carried in her bones. 

“You know,” he says. “One day, you’re going to have to laugh at one of my jokes, Smith.” 

She gives him a half-hearted twitch of the lips. 

He laughs. “See? The world didn’t end, did it?” 

Sara laughs a little harder, a little sharper. “There’s still time.” 

A few days later, he asks her out for a drink. She’s not sure how he got her number—but the Ministry has its resources, its connections. 

She deletes the text and puts him to the back of her mind, until months later when the world ends and everything changes. Sissay might just be a cog in a much larger machine. There are other forces at work here—and she’ll be damned if she lets some hired gun get in her way.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one goes out to all you thirsty kids out there. You know who you are 
> 
> (S4 spoilers)

Sometimes, for some reason, people ask Runner Five if the two of them are—you know, together? 

Five and Steve, they have something going on, even if Five isn’t sure what. It simmers for a while—the blink between punches, the silent moments before an explosion, red bleeding into blue. They’re so imbalanced, so oppositional, it almost feels like a balance in itself. 

It wouldn’t be an issue for Five if it didn’t happen so damn often. If it weren’t so fucking ridiculous. When Five overhears it, they fight not to openly laugh—as if they would be capable of keeping up a healthy relationship in the apocalypse at all, let alone with the one person they despise the most. 

The worst part about it is, when they look at Steve, his face is always twisted into something between smug and amused. 

“Define ‘together,’” he says, tongue loosened by the alcohol. Not that he needed the help. “Do you mean, ‘Would probably leave me for dead if I ever became a liability?’ Because if you do, then yes. We’re very much together.” 

That’s never what they mean, though. They’re always trying to ask if the one-sided hate could ever bloom into romance—if the amusement in his eyes when he looks at them could ever mean love. Five sincerely hopes, for his sake, that it doesn’t. 

Still though, one night after those questions, Five finds themself in a dark room with him alone. His pale face is lit only by a lamp on the table, the warm glow making his features look muted, softer than they really are.

He’s resting his head on the side of the couch, leaning in close—too close—and Five can’t ignore the way his cheeks are flushed red with alcohol and his hair is ruffled in a way they’ve never seen it before. Even on runs, he never has a hair out of place, always carefully arranged to look perfectly messy. 

It’s still not love, though. 

It isn’t, and never will be. Five isn’t stupid enough to think that they could ever have a healthy, functional, human relationship with him because monsters can’t love—and that’s what he is. He doesn’t hold any loyalty in his heart. It doesn’t mean shit that they want to kiss him. Kiss him or kill him, either one would be fine.

He says something stupid, something that doesn’t register over the blur of moonshine in Five’s mind, and before he can say another word Five is pushing him furiously against the back of the couch, lips smashed together. 

When they finally pull apart, they’re both breathless. Moments before their lips touch again, Steve smirks and pulls back. 

“What?” Five says, heated and exasperated and maybe a little bit turned on, even if they’d never admit it. 

“You do like me.” 

“Oh, fuck off.” 

Five pulls away, off the couch, and storms out of the room. 

The next time the two of them are paired on a mission together, Steve doesn’t look Five in the eyes. Every time the pet name “love” comes onto the tip of his tongue, one glare from Five stops him in his tracks. And Five doesn’t mind one bit. 

It isn’t love—it can never be love—and it’s better to keep it that way.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (S5 spoilers)

Steve and Kefilwe have settled into a stilted routine. When he comes by for checkups, they dance around each other; the smooth curves of objects caught in orbit, never touching. He looks at her like she’s made of marble, a statue on a pedestal, golden scales in her hands. Their shoulders do not brush. 

Kefilwe notices him staring at her, sidelong, from beneath his lashes. It’s not spring, but he still smells like flowers and something sharper—the smell as thick as fear of dying. The light reflected in his hollowed eyes almost makes him look human again. She always looks away. 

They don’t talk about it, but then, they rarely talk about anything. 

They stumbled together into bed for the first time months ago, drunk and laughing and dizzy on their feet. She remembers the way the moonlight filtered through the blinds, falling on his eyelashes, leaking down to his lips, his throat. 

Afterward, he held her in his arms, gentle, like she was the last fragile thing in the world. She told him to stop looking at her like that, and he just squeezed her tighter. 

The world was younger then, simpler. He’d probably forgotten all that anyways. 

Kefilwe hadn’t forgotten. 

“Lobatse,” he says when he steps through the door, and she winces, hearing the hollowness of it. 

“Kefilwe,” Steve tries again. He’s on his knees in the dirt, looking up at her with a hurt in his eyes so deep that she wonders for a moment how she can refuse him. 

Kefilwe feels the weight of it then, those years from girlhood to womanhood—suddenly conscious of the grey at her temples and the weight on her shoulders. Some of the grief must show on her face, because he tries again:

“Kefi.” He presses closer to her, shifting on his knees until she can feel the heat of his breath trailing on her thighs. She doesn’t look at him at first. She can’t. 

She watches the fields outside the window, listening to the wind whisper through them. She watches the moon, blurry and shifting through the stalks. When she finally looks back down at Steve, he’s staring at her with wide eyes, looking utterly terrified, vulnerable and young in a way that she’s never seen him before. A way he’s never allowed himself to be before. 

“Steven,” she says, and reaches out, putting her hand through his hair. Not stroking, exactly. Just softly touching the edges of it, letting herself be closer to him than she has in months. 

“God, Kefi,” he finally sighs, gathering up fistfuls of her shirt like he’s afraid she’ll vanish from him, pressing his face into her stomach. He clings to her like a man drowning, and the moonlight glances off the wet blood on his knuckles. 

“You’re bleeding,” she says, fighting back the rising concern. The instincts pulling at her gut to help him. He doesn’t deserve it, she wants to tell herself, but since when has it been her place to decide whether her patients deserved it or not? 

“Oh,” he says, and lets out a huff of a laugh. 

“Don’t move,” she tells him, backing up to grab bandages off the back shelf, but he’s still grasping at her shirt, leaning forward, chasing her into the dark. 

“Wait.” There’s a curl of desperation in his voice, and it freezes her in place. “I-I don’t need anything, Kefilwe. It’s not worth it. No use wasting supplies on old wounds.”

“No.” She rips herself from his hands and turns to the counter, grabbing the bandages, a cloth, and a bottle of alcohol. 

“Kefilwe,” he says, and it’s not much pleading anymore. His voice is tougher now—almost a growl between his teeth. “Don’t. It’s no use.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Steven.”

When she turns back to him he grabs her wrists to still her. For a moment, she’s frozen. She can’t breathe. The alcohol sloshes in the bottle, back and forth in its plastic cage. Back and forth. Her heart is seized by something she can’t quite name, but it quickly seeps into anger. 

“Don’t touch me,” she says and tears her wrists from his grasp. She set her supplies on the counter and glares at him. “I can’t have you bleeding all over the township, Steven. It’s a medical risk.”

He drops his hands, his head. “Right. A risk.”

“Yes.”

Steve’s hands shift a little in his lap. “I’m sorry.”

“Give me your hands, Steven.”

“I shouldn’t have touched you. I shouldn’t have grabbed you like that.”

“Please give me your hands.”

Steve holds his knuckles up to her, his wrists a limp offering. He still doesn’t lift his head. 

She wets the cloth and dabs at the scabbing wounds, pressing on and off until the cloth comes away stained a deep red. He doesn’t make a sound, his lips pressed into a hard line. He’s swaying a little, on his knees, with his eyes closed and Kefilwe wonders for a moment if he needs more medical attention. 

When he opens his eyes again, they’re wet, runny, red around the edges. Kefilwe can’t disguise the surprise that jolts through her. She takes a step back. 

“Oh. Steve.” 

“I—I’m fine,” he says. “It’s nothing, I’m sorry.”

He closes his eyes again and falls into a steady pattern of breathing. His inhales-exhales neatly folded in on each other, in and out, until his breath steadies and his eyes are clear and sharp again. 

Kefilwe looks at him. The sight of him—on his knees, bent over as if in prayer, breaking around the edges, far from the distant soldier that she had known him to be—it makes something seize in her chest. But it can’t take back the things he’s done. She can’t bring herself to detach his actions from his character. 

“I don’t believe you’re as bad as the things you do, Steven,” she whispers softly. 

He looks at her with a painful edge of something that looks a little too close to hope. 

“But,” she continues. “I’m not going to feel sorry for you.” 

“I—” He withdraws his hands back into his lap and won’t meet her eyes. “I wouldn't ask you to.”

“Then why are you here, Steve? Why do you keep coming?”

“Because I’m weak, Kefi. You make me weak.” 

His hair flops over into his eyes in a way that’s a little endearing, but Kefilwe fights back the rush of fondness and replaces it with hard steel in her voice when she tells him, “I don’t care. That’s not my problem right now. If you are in need of medical attention, I will always be here to help. But beyond that, I think it’s better that you stay away, Steven. Stay with your friends. Ian, or Runner Five.” Bitterness rises in her throat when she thinks of Five—just another friend turned traitor, another reason not to trust, not to fall for his stupid hair and gentleman-like charm. 

“Ian’s not my friend, love. Never will be.” Steve still won’t look at her. He presses his fingers gingerly against the wounds on his knuckles. “And... I’m sorry for what he’s been doing. To you. To the township.”

“Last I heard, starving the township was your idea.”

Steve falls silent. His wrists look pale and frighteningly thin, bird-like in the moonlight. She wonders if he’s been subject to the food shortages too—she’d always assumed he was eating the same as Ian. 

His chest trembles, eyes fluttering shut. “I’m sorry,” is all he manages to say, barely a faint whisper in the quiet. 

“Well, Steven, sorry won’t fix this. Sorry won’t fix anything.” In an uncharacteristic burst of malice, she rips off a long strip of the bandaging and throws it in his lap. “Go wrap it yourself. Get out of my hut, please.”

She turns around and busies herself with her tools, mindlessly reorganizing and moving things around aimlessly. Anything to keep her hands occupied, keep her eyes fixed on the wall of the hut. 

When she turns back to the entrance, he’s gone. The bandaging lies unused on the ground. She sighs, picks it up, and puts it back in the cabinet.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ;) 
> 
> Set after the S5 finale, (S5 spoilers)

There’s somebody in the doorway of the comms shack. It takes Sam a few moments to process—he stills for a moment at his desk, listening. The faint creak of the hardwood floor, a breath of noise in the stillness. He feels a slow trickle of discomfort along the back of his neck. There are eyes on him from the dark. Watching him. Slowly, ever so carefully, he reaches for the axe leaning against his desk. 

“It’s late,” Steve says from behind him, and Sam almost jumps out of his skin. 

“Jesus!” 

“You can just call me Steve, love.” 

Sam turns to glare at him. “It’s a lot less cool when you do that—you know, like, in the middle of the night. I thought you were-”

“A zombie?” 

For a terrible second, he flashes back to that moment—passing baby Sara up through the bars, the awful thick smell of rotting flesh all around him. There’s a claw of fear that wraps around his throat for a flicker of a moment. before it’s gone, disappearing into the back of his mind, where he’s been pushing all his bad feelings for the past few months.

Sam slumps down a little heavier his chair. “Sorry, Steve. I’ve just been a bit…on edge these days. It’s hard not to...you know.”

Steve steps forward into the light, lounging against the door frame like he’s meant to be there. It’s only been a week or so since he’s stopped walking with the cane. There’s still an unsteadiness to his step, a weight to it that there hadn’t been before. Even with all of Steve’s bluster and confidence, he doesn’t carry the same grace about him—doesn’t hold hard eye contact, not like before. Something seems smaller about him, despite his size. More vulnerable. 

It might be the scars. They’ve faded over time, now little more than pink marks across his face, neck, arms—but Sam knows he’s always prided himself on his looks. Or it might just be the way he sucks his breath in through his teeth sometimes, stares off into space like there’s something weighing on him, guilt or fear or something worse. Sam isn’t the only one awake when he shouldn’t be. 

“I can’t sleep,” Sam says, bracing his elbows against the desk and avoiding Steve’s hard stare. “I dunno. A lot on my mind.”

“Still working?” He gestures to the scatter of papers, some of them Janine’s, the rest in Sam’s awkward scrawl. 

“Keeping our runners safe,” Sam says, almost defensively. “Planning, as best we can. It’s what Janine would have wanted.”

“You’ll burn yourself out like this, love,” he says softly, and Sam can’t think of anything else to say. A laugh punches out of his teeth instead of an answer. Sam can feel the fatigue dripping from every bone in his body, the bags under his eyes, the trembling in his fingertips. 

But Steve doesn’t press. He just jerks his head in a sharp nod—not asking to understand, just acknowledging, and Sam thinks he can appreciate that. They sit together like that in the dark, waiting, for what Sam doesn’t know. Dawn, maybe. Or for one of them to speak, but Sam finds that he’s perfectly comfortable in the silence. 

By the time Sam’s eyes adjust to the light, Steve’s looking off out the window. His eyes are bright, a sharp blue in the glow of the lamps outside, shoulders braced against the wall, one leg folded behind the other.

He’s barefoot, a little sleepy and, Sam thinks, undeniably gorgeous. Steve turns back, a ghost of a smile on his lips. Sam shivers. 

“Are you cold?” Steve asks, leaning forward.

“I’m fine.”

He shudders again at the look in Steve’s eyes: concerned and just a touch possessive. He looks away, quickly. An amused huff from Steve tells Sam that he saw it, and he doesn’t need to look to picture the smug half-smile curving at Steve’s lips. 

Sam stands up and crosses the room so fast he doesn’t quite remember doing it. He stands close, swaying a little in his exhaustion. There’s stubble along the line of Steve’s jaw, and the glow from the window reflecting on the whites of his eyes makes him look older, somehow, more weary. 

He risked everything to betray the Ministry, got himself beat to near-death and came back scarred because of it, and yet still here he is, perfectly calm, smirking a little, looking like he can read Sam like a book. 

Sam shivers again, unable to help himself. A light and painful feeling swells in his chest, something that he hasn’t felt in a long time. He reaches out to touch Steve’s hand, carefully at first. “Steve. Um. Can I—can I kiss you?”

Steve gives him a look so soft that it hurts. He brings his hand up to Sam’s cheek, hovers for a brief moment, as if he’s afraid to touch him, afraid to break him. “Oh, Sam,” he says. “Do you really have to ask?”

He can smell the gunpowder on Steve’s jacket, feel the tension, the power in his shoulders, but he’s pressing Sam against the wall and kissing him so gently that it steals the breath right out of his lungs.   
Steve tastes like smoke and something sweeter—something deeply intoxicating, and Sam starts to lose himself in it. He keeps his eyes fixed shut, mouth moving clumsily against Steve’s, trying to pretend like this is normal, like they’re two healthy, normal people that love each other, not tangled in the half-dark of the comms shack because they’re both hurting too much to be alone. 

The beating of his heart, tightening fingers, eyelids fluttering shut and all of the sensations heightening—it’s too much and not enough all once, it’s happening now but it all feels miles away. They break apart, breathing hard. Lips still nearly touching. All Sam can think to say is, “Okay.”

Steve doesn’t say anything for once, just breathes long and slow. He smiles, but there’s no smugness in it this time. It’s warm, lopsided, genuine. 

“Please, do that again,” Sam says, and they’re kissing again, hands wandering to each other’s hips.  
In the heat of the moment, Sam ends up leaving more bites than kisses—along his jaw, his neck, his chest, anything to get a noise out of him and Steve lets him—he lets him do it, he almost welcomes it, maybe because he thinks it counts as an apology to let himself get hurt. 

Sam almost pulls away at the thought, but Steve is clutching at him like a drowning man, and all he can think to do is keep pressing kisses along his neck until both their breathing slows and everything comes to a shuddering stop.

“You okay?” Sam mumbles against his neck. Steve makes a noise that he can’t quite decipher—but his hand on Sam’s hip is just right, tight and warm and pressed up against his skin like he belongs there.

Morning air cools the sweat on Sam’s collarbone as he holds him, crushed a little under his weight. It’s an awkward angle, with Steve’s draped over him, but Sam doesn’t complain. He just squeezes even tighter, pressing his lips into the marks he’s left behind just because it makes everything feel a little lighter, somehow. 

Steve pulls back, just a little. He’s staring straight at Sam, almost right through him, as if he’s seeing his face for the first time. He laughs, and the sound tugs deep in Sam’s chest.

“God, you’re bloody gorgeous, Sam. You know that? Beautiful,” he says, out of breath, a little weak, and Sam has to bite his lip to stop from smiling, just a little.

“Shush.” 

“Absolutely wonderful,” Steve breathes against his neck.

Sam smacks him on the side. “Shush.”

They stand there just a little longer, curled against each other as morning draws close. Steve’s breath is warm, tickling along the edge of Sam’s jaw. “I should get back,” he murmurs, pulling away. His fingers trail carefully down Sam’s arm, but all too soon the warmth is gone. “Try to get some sleep.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you too.” Sam shivers with Steve’s weight gone, still pressed against the wall. Cheeks still flushed, feeling a bit lost. He watches the sun’s haze slowly gathering along the windowsill.

“We have a big day tomorrow. Abel needs you awake and alert.” Sam hears the padding of feet that tells him Steve is heading for the door. 

“Steve?”

He stops. His shoulders tense a little, but he doesn’t turn around. “Yeah?”

For a moment, Sam wonders if Steve wants the same thing he does. Maybe there could be something if he wanted it badly enough, if he asked for it. But something about it doesn’t feel right—the timing is off, everything is off. He thinks of Janine, what she would say if she were here right now. Romance isn’t necessary. It’s frivolous—something to indulge in when they had time, hope, the upper hand. 

This thing—whatever is happening between them—Sam knows any semblance of this vulnerability will disappear into the dawn light. It’s best if they don’t talk about it again. 

Sam fiddles with his pen for a few seconds in the quiet, and then sighs. “Never mind. Goodnight, Steve. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Steve disappears around the corner, and Sam lets the silence hang between them.


End file.
